Clean Beauty, Dirty Carbon: Rethinking Ingredient Sourcing in Skincare
Why Ingredient Miles Matter in Skincare
In the clean and natural skincare world, we’ve learned to ask about parabens, microplastics, and synthetic fragrances. But there’s another question most of us never think to ask: how far did this ingredient travel to reach my skin?
Ingredient miles, the hidden journeys behind your favorite oils and butters and corresponding carbon footprint, can make the difference between a formula that truly respects the planet and one that simply looks the part.
What Are Ingredient Miles?
The term comes from the idea of food miles: the distance food travels from farm to plate. In skincare, it means the total distance an ingredient moves from where it’s grown or harvested to where it’s processed, refined, blended, packaged, and finally sold.
As an example, I’ll talk about something I personally witnessed in my clothing career, a simple tee shirt. This shirt was made from cotton that was grown in the US and the shirt was mostly sold in the US. But the steps in between gave it a giant carbon footprint. That cotton was first shipped to India where it was processed and spun into fabric. From there it headed to Argentina, where it was dyed. Finally, it headed back to Bangladesh, where it was sewn into a final product. From there it shipped back to the US, where it was sold and sent to stores and customers. This means that a plant grown and sold in the US could have had a 2000 mile path to reach the customer but instead traveled around 35,000 miles, over 17x the distance. Your favorite face oil might follow a similar path. Skincare ingredients often go through multiple rounds of processing in multiple countries before reaching your jar. That means the actual path can be far longer than “Country of Origin” suggests.
Why Most Clean Beauty Overlooks This
Many “clean” or “natural” products market themselves with botanical names and nature-filled imagery. But the ingredient story usually stops there.
Global supply chains make tropical oils and butters cheap and abundant, so they’ve become standard in natural formulations.
Certifications like organic and fair trade focus on how something is grown, not how far it travels afterward.
Processing miles — the refining, bleaching, deodorizing, and fractionating that often happen continents away from the source — are rarely disclosed.
The result: a balm can be called “local” or “green” even if its ingredients have more stamps on their passports than you do.
Why This Matters Beyond the Carbon Footprint
Ingredient miles affect more than just sustainability:
Freshness and stability: Oils degrade over time, especially during long, unrefrigerated shipping.
Transparency: More middlemen mean more opportunities for substitution, dilution, or inconsistent quality.
Cost layers: Every transfer adds markups, so you can pay more for a less-fresh ingredient.
How Wildforth Keeps It Close
From the start, we set a hard rule: Our lipids, waxes, and botanicals should be grown and processed in the United States whenever possible, with limited exceptions for irreplaceable ingredients.
We avoid imported tropical butters entirely.
We choose high-performance Pacific Northwest crops like hazelnut and meadowfoam oils.
We source as closely to our Seattle-area manufacturing as we can, even if that means paying more.
We work with domestic suppliers who can trace their ingredients back to specific farms or co-ops, and constantly seek greater visibility in our supply chain.
This approach cuts thousands of miles from each ingredient’s journey, keeps our quality control tight, and reduces the number of hands between harvest and your skin.
What You Can Do as a Customer
Read ingredient lists and learn where those plants actually grow.
Ask brands about both origin and processing location.
Look for domestic alternatives to tropical commodities when possible.
The next time you pick up a balm or lotion, ask yourself: how many miles did this travel before it reached me? The answer might surprise you, and change how you think about truly sustainable skincare.
